Destroyer and the Reds, Pink, & Purples
Ottobar, Baltimore MD, May 8, 2023
It takes a lot to coax me to drive to Baltimore on a Monday night, especially given the week as chaotic as the last couple that I’ve had. I was sufficiently excited to see the rare East Coast show by the Reds, Pinks, & Purples, the bedroom pop project of Glenn Davidson from San Francisco, that I made the schlep up to the appealingly squalid Ottobar to see their opening show for Destroyer.
I have described the
Reds, Pinks, & Purples as something akin to an American Sarah Records project, a gloomy chiming indie pop with influences from Flying Nun, to the Smiths, to clear overtones of the glum ringing beauty of Britain’s the Clientele.
Because Glenn Donaldson is the only member of the ensemble, I didn’t know quite what to expect when I drove up early, expecting a crowded bar. I needn't have worried, as I could park directly in front of the venue, and there was practically no one there by the time I arrived. The show did eventually fill out. But it seemed a bit spartan, even for a Monday night in a medium-sized market like Baltimore.
Glenn Donaldson is a stocky, balding, 50-something-year-old white dude with facial hair. He looks like he could be the IT manager at a medium-sized bank. For all, I know, he actually is an IT manager at a bank. But for the last several years, he’s produced a ridiculous volume of original and cover material, mostly released digitally on Bandcamp with some full-length albums. Clearly he’s been at this a very long time. But the Reds, Pinks, & Purples have only existed under this name since around 2019, and I picked up on their work during the pandemic.
The album,
Uncommon Weather, released in 2021, is a work of rare beauty, and mournful elegance, a haunted and loving portrait of San Francisco’s Richmond neighborhood, with tales of romantic misery and hushed warnings about dangers seen and unseen. There is a newer full LP from 2022,
Summer at Land’s End, and a dizzying array of internet-only singles, EPs, and
free covers mini-albums showing influences from the Monkees to Lana Del Rey to Screaming Trees, all performed solo by Davidson on overdubbed acoustic and electric guitars, drum machines, and hushed, gauzy singing.
During the pandemic, it seemed like every week or two I would get another message from Bandcamp about get another new release from the Reds, Pinks, & Purples, some of them as self-referential as the Bandcamp Friday single, “Have You Put Your Song Up Today?” In their releases, Davidson also adopted a distinctive visual aesthetic of flowers and vintage architecture from photographs around his neighborhood, which gives his entire oeuvre a compelling unity of form. (The releases also tend to be duplicative; I’ve routinely found myself deleting purchases when I find that a new record comprises previous singles and b-sides I already had downloaded.) In fact, probably the only thing that’s keeping him from releasing new music at this moment is his touring with Destroyer, which is a remarkable thing, indeed, for a guy who basically had only played in his own home or neighborhood cafés in San Francisco.
Donaldson had only an opening set to work with but his songs are short and he and his band were able to squeeze in nine or ten of them during the exceedingly prompt 8:00 start to the set. At Baltimore’s Ottobar, I was expecting to see him take the stage alone, as he recorded the songs, perhaps, with an acoustic guitar. Instead, he appeared without an instrument but with a full band of two electric guitarists, a bassist, and a drummer, each of whom was probably half his age. They recast many of the songs from
Uncommon Weather and
Land’s End to play up the band capacity, which resulted in some songs gaining substantial momentum, and other songs being recast completely for a band setting, like in a
short (free) live record for BBC in Northern Ireland.
I can’t be sure if many of the audience had come to see Reds, Pinks, & Purples, but I know I wasn’t the only one to have made the drive from DC. After struggling in the shadows for years, Davidson has actually found an audience for this kind of music with the pandemic-era buzz about the Reds, Pinks, & Purples. But it seems that Davidson doesn’t quite know how to manage a touring band, since he didn’t seem to know what to do without an instrument, other than emoting with his hands someone awkwardly, but it was all tremendously endearing. Also, he puzzlingly used his between-song banter to make apparently contentious assertions about the best Lungfish records, which is a band of which I know nothing.
With the band adding shimmering textures and harmonies, songs like “Don’t Ever Pray in the Church on My Street,” one of the highlights from
Uncommon Weather, were recast from the solo versions of his bedroom studio. There was a mild sense of psychedelia to the entwined electric guitars but also a sweetness to the entire performance. And notwithstanding the awkwardness there is a sense of
belated validation for Donaldson’s work — he’s been recording under innumerable names and with collaborators since 1990, as he described in an
interview with psychedelic zine Ptolemaic Terrascope (best known for the Bevis Frond affiliations) way back in the early 2000s. Many of Donaldson’s songs are specifically written from the voice of someone whose deepest emotions are felt around the love of music, including songs about buying music (“I Saw You at the Record Shop Today”) and others directly addressing listeners and their faithless ways (“The Biggest Fan”), so it’s tempting to think of this as ultimately music made by an introverted music fan that only accidentally reached a larger audience.
The set closed with the should-have-been hit from
Summer at Land’s End, “Let’s Pretend We’re Not In Love,” a melody of wistful regret that could have been from the Ocean Blue during the mid-1990s. And whether or not the crowd arrived as fans of his work, they certainly left the set fully in his camp.
Now as for
Destroyer: I'm just really not a Dan Bejar fan. My experiences with him as a New Pornographer showed him to be disengaged at best as a live performer, although in fairness it’s not really “his” band, even though he wrote and sang many of the most memorably off-kilter songs on their early records (typically, three per record; it must be written somewhere in an MOU). The last tour that I saw of the full band, he was prone to walk onto the stage for his own material (“Myriad Harbour,” “Jackie,” and others), sing it with an air of disdain, and then walk off until his next lead vocal.
Notwithstanding his supporting role in the New Pornographers, I never quite grasped the appeal of Destroyer. I think I like the songs in isolation but the entire aesthetic over the course of an album seems overkill. Furthermore, Bejar tends to lean into a lyrical portrayal of toxic masculinity that is a bit like Father John Misty, although with Father John Misty it's clearly intended as a stage character of Josh Tillman’s, and with Bejar it is less transparently so.
This was described as a Bejar solo tour, but in fact, he was joined by additional electric guitarist to complement his strumming on a battered acoustic. And while Bejar is scarcely an exemplar of stage presence, he did engage modestly with the crowd over the show and even chuckled good-naturedly as a fan quietly imitated his “bom bom bom” wordless vocal improvisations, like a Chasid humming a wordless niggun (and with his hair and beard it wouldn’t be hard for Bejar to grow payot and pass as a Chasid either).
I don’t have a deep knowledge of the vast Destroyer catalogue, but in the ambitiously long setlist that Bejar shared with the crowd, he pulled all the way back to his earliest material in the late 1990s, and all the way up to a solitary track from his most recent record, 2022’s untypeable
Labyrinthitis, “Tintoretto, It’s For You,” a leering reflection on imminent death and judgment.
Destroyer records tend to flesh themselves out with tones and textures ranging from Steely Dan-influenced sleazy horns to smooth yacht rock and mechanical drumming, depending on the record, but in a solo show with acoustic guitar, it’s all of a whole with Bejar’s nasally, oddly accentuated singing and cryptic lyrics. The setlist shows an abundance of songs from
Your Blues and
Destroyer’s Rubies, and then isolated tracks from more acclaimed records like
Kaputt — and the most recent album had only one, the aforementioned “Tintoretto.” He jumped around his voluminous back catalogue, interspersing songs from twenty years ago (“The Music Lovers” from
Your Blues) and even further back with recent material.
As a non-expert in the Destroyer catalogue, I found a greater sense of continuity in the live show than my past listens to his albums; there the variety in the production styles and the backing instruments overshadows the commonality of Bejar's songwriting idiosyncrasies: his grasp of peculiar concrete lyrical detail, his relentless allusion to past musicians and song quotes, his pervasive misanthropy. He circles back to odd phrases, or even the wordless bom bom boms, where other writers might look for a catchier chorus. From 2020’s
Have We Met, in “Cue Synthesizer,” he mused despondently, “Been to America, been to Europe, it's the same shit / Went to America, went to Europe, it's all the same shit.” From
Kaputt, “Song for America,” one of Bejar’s myriad songs questioning American exceptionalism, he glumly contemplates:
Winter, spring, summer, and fall
Animals crawl towards death’s embrace
Winter, spring, summer, fall
Punks kick a ball
In a park on a Sunday
Strung out in the rain
Despite the gloom and doom, Bejar was actually genial with the crowd. And I wasn’t wholly in love with the performance or with the work but I feel I now understand and appreciate Destroyer more than I ever had, which certainly made the stay for the headliner worth the drive.
Edited 5 time(s). Last edit at 05/16/2023 01:20PM by zwirnm.
